Santa and Mrs. Claus will visit the Rochester Hills Museum on Saturday, December 6 from 9-4 p.m. Children can enjoy a wagon ride to the 1840 Van Hoosen Farmhouse that is decked out for the season, enjoy cookies, games, a quilt exhibit, wooden toys, and more. Limited tickets are sold each hour to avoid any delays. Ticket costs are $ 4 for Museum members and $ 7 for nonmembers. Parents are free and bring your own camera! For reservations, please call 248.656.4663 or email rhmuseum@rochesterhills.org.
Rochester Hills Museum Hosts The Golden Age of American Political Cartooning
The Rochester Hills Museum recently closed its new special exhibition, The Golden Age of American Political Cartooning. This exhibit was on loan from the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio, and consisted of more than 70 original published cartoons and sketches from 1870-1900. This special exhibit ran through November 2008.
American political cartooning came of age after the Civil War. The first great American political cartoonist Thomas Nast used his stark, unrelenting attack style to destroy the corrupt Tammany Hall regime run by William Tweed and reelect President Ulysses Grant. Nast's work for Harper's Weekly proved that pictures could be more powerful than words in shaping public opinion. Regarding Nast's cartoon, Tweed reportedly said, "Stop them damned pictures. I don't care so much what the papers say about me. My constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures!" Tweed was later convicted of stealing 100 million dollars from New York City taxpayers and died in jail.
Nast's chiding, hard-driven style gave way to the wittier, satiric, and colorful works of Joseph Keppler and his colleagues and imitators at Puck and Judge magazines. The cartoonists hoped to serve as a moral compass to keep America on the path to becoming a world power in a new industrial age.
Many scholars consider the political cartoons created between the Civil War and 1900 to be the finest in American history. These cartoonists had the luxury of time to work on their cartoons because their works appeared mainly in weekly publications. Printers had time to run pages through multiple presses in order to produce full color cartoons. Technology ended this "golden age" because the photoengraving process adopted by newspapers in the 1890s made it possible to print cartoons on a daily basis. To meet daily deadlines cartoons became less elaborate and were printed in black and white. Today, artists and historians alike appreciate these colorful cartoons.
